The rally-intensive campaign: A distinct form of electioneering in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond Pre-proof of article for publication in the International Journal of Press/Politics in May 2019 Dr. Dan Paget Department of Political Science University College London danpaget.com [email protected] The literature on political communication is a redoubt of modernist thought. Histories of political communication are in part histories of technological progress. Accounts, which are too numerous to list comprehensively here, rehearse a well-worn story in which newspapers are joined by radio, limited-channel television, multiple-channel television, the Internet and social media in turn (Dinkin 1989; Epstein 2018). Numerous authors have organized these successive innovations into ‘ages’ or ‘orders’ of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Epstein 2018). These modernist ideas bleed into the study of election campaigns. A series of accounts using parallel categories construct three ideal-types of election campaign (Norris 2000). These campaign types capture, among other things, changes in the methods by which messages are conveyed. ‘Old’ face-to-face methods of communication in ‘premodern’ campaigns are supplemented and sometimes replaced by a succession of ‘new’ methods in ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ campaigns. These theories embrace a form of developmental linearity. They conceive of a single path of campaign ‘evolution’ (Norris 2000). While campaigns may progress or regress, campaign change Dan Paget Pre-proof version is collapsed onto a single dimension, whether by the name of modernization or professionalization. It is this linearity that gives typologies of election campaigns their modernist character. It is also essential to these theories’ parochialism. Media systems have been studied extensively beyond the Western world. However, typologies in the narrower domain of election campaigns remain remarkably Western-centric in both their source material and domains of application, albeit with notable exceptions (Plasser and Plasser 2002). In this article, I do not challenge the conventional causal accounts of campaign change. However, I complicate these typologies. I contend that their conceptual linearity obscures variation in another aspect of electioneering: ground campaigns. In these typologies, ground campaigns feature only by virtue of their centrality in premodern campaigns and their peripherality in modern and postmodern campaigns. However, ground campaigns vary. In some, politicians reach few citizens directly at rallies. Instead, the rally is primarily a device to win media coverage. It is used almost exclusively by party leaders, if it is used at all. By contrast, in other ground campaigns, the rally is a medium through which junior and senior politicians alike interact directly with large portions of their constituents. For example, on the eve of Turkey’s 2018 election, an estimated million people attended one rally (Shaheen 2018). In India’s 2019 campaign, an estimated half million people attended another (Al Jazeera 2019). Rallies are important features of some Latin American campaigns (de la Torre and Conaghan 2009; Szwarcberg 2012). Data that I present below reveals that aggregate rally attendance is high in many Asian countries, and higher still in many African countries. However, existing typologies of election campaigns cannot satisfactorily express this variation in ground campaigns. I revise Norris’ typology to address that shortcoming. This adapted typology creates the conceptual space to incorporate a distinct ideal-type: the rally-intensive campaign. This proposed revision moves the center of gravity of the schema from the Global North towards the Global South. It equips the typology to capture important aspects of campaigns in 2 Dan Paget Pre-proof version parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It gives expression to differences between these campaigns and their Western counterparts. Equally, it makes important distinctions within the population of ‘premodern’ election campaigns. Therefore, it speaks to the debate about electioneering in the Western world, and widely-accepted accounts of the main features of historic campaign evolution. While the prominence of the rally is intercontinental, it is most pronounced in parts of sub- Saharan Africa. In spite of this, the means through which political messages are conveyed are little studied in the Africanist literature. Some of the last major works to study the structure of face-to-face communication in sub-Saharan Africa were written before the third wave of democratization and the revival of multiparty campaigns (Ellis 1989; Haugerud 1995). While their insights remain pertinent, they deserve updating. A rich body of work has developed which examines electioneering in multiparty sub-Saharan Africa. However, the great majority of these studies focus on parties’ messages or appeals. The means and media by which parties convey those messages in the campaign are little-studied. This is my point of departure from the Africanist literature. I seek to restore the character and structure of campaign communication in general and ground campaign communication in particular to the study of African electioneering. I argue that in many African campaigns, the rally is the primary medium of direct campaign communication. This structural aspect of campaign ecology underpins a variety of other features of the ground campaign. Equally, the prominence of the rally is a source of substantial variation between African campaigns; while some are rally-intensive, others are not. Typologies should make distinctions which turn on fundamental characteristics alone. I argue that aggregate rally-intensiveness is associated with four typical features. I demonstrate this through a detailed study of an extreme case (Flyvbjerg 2006): Tanzania. If the survey data is correct, Tanzania has the most rally-intensive campaigns in Africa, and to the best of my 3 Dan Paget Pre-proof version knowledge, the world. I distil the four features of the rally-intensive campaign by observing the stark form that they take in the Tanzanian case. First, drawing on my ethnographic research, I show that not only national leaders dedicate substantial effort to convening rallies. Mid- and low- level candidates do too. Therefore, during each day of the campaign, thousands of rallies are convened, both locally and nationally. Second, using original survey data, I show that local rallies are better attended in aggregate than national ones. Consequently, in rally-intensive campaigns, a large proportion of campaign contact is not only direct but intimate. Third, I show that in rally- intensive campaigns the mass meeting dwarfs the canvass as a form of campaign contact. Fourth, I illustrate that Tanzanian parties’ ground campaign efforts are concentrated not on canvassing, but on a bundle of activities which I term the ‘production’ of rallies. Thereby, this paper deals in what John Gerring ironically describes as ‘mere description’ (Gerring 2012). It takes the categorization and characterization of campaigns as an academic end in itself. I proceed in this article by introducing the comparative typologies of election campaigns. In the second section, I juxtapose these works to the literature on election campaigning in sub-Saharan Africa to throw into relief the relative silence of the latter on ground campaign contact. In the third section, I present my departure from both of these literatures. I argue that aggregate rally attendance varies. It varies between the Global South and the contemporary Western world, within sub-Saharan Africa, and within the population of historic ‘premodern’ campaigns in Western countries. I argue that existing campaign typologies obscure, rather than order, this variation. I advance a typology of campaign ecologies adopted from Norris’ own which incorporates the rally-intensive campaign as a distinct ideal-type. In the fourth section, I enumerate typical features of the rally-intensive campaign by presenting evidence from my research in Tanzania. 4 Dan Paget Pre-proof version Typologies of election campaigns Pippa Norris advances a typology of premodern, modern, and postmodern campaigns (Norris 2000). Rachel Gibson and Andrea Römmele distinguish between premodern, modern and professional campaigns in almost identical terms (Gibson and Rommele 2001). Similarly, David Farrell and Paul Webb have advanced three ‘stages’ of election campaign professionalization (Farrell and Webb 2000). In parallel, Jay Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh identify three ‘ages of political communication’ (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999) and Ben Epstein enumerates four ‘political communication orders’ (Epstein 2018). Typologies of political communication have broader scopes than typologies of election campaigns. Nonetheless, these typologies agree in numerous respects. Each, save Epstein’s, enumerates three categories.i Each takes the proliferation of limited channel television as the dividing line, or part of the dividing line, between the first and second categories. Equally, each takes the multiplication of television channels, the diffusion of the Internet, and related developments as the dividing line, or part of the dividing line, between the second and third categories.ii They identify similar sets of features as characteristic of each category too. Norris takes the media and means of communication, party campaign activity, political party organization and the behavior of the electorate as the